MARCEL PROUSTLA JEUNESSE. Yes, but you get a lot more in the Almanac
Hachette, and it only costs 2 francs 50.
PROUST (laughing heartily). Oh, very good! Oh, how it hurts
me to laugh like that! How witty you are, Monsieur
La Jeunesse! How delightful it must be, to be as witty as
that!Proust, when it was duly reported to him, was inconsolable.. "They have hurt me enormously," he said, weeping, to Gaston
de Caillavet at Mme Arman's next Wednesday; "I thought they
were so nice-and they're utterly heartless!" But his distress,
though disproportionate, was not unreasonable; for the appar-
ently harmless mockery of his former schoolfriends was the anger
of Bloch aware of the Narrator's preference for Saint-Loup.
A few weeks later, on I I April, he paid a visit to two retired
servants of the family in an old folks' home at Issy, accompanied
by Albert Flament. Again Flament noticed his astonishing gift
for mimicry and pastiche, 'like the touch of colour on a pencil-
sketch by F orain', as he impersonated the ladies of the Faubourg
Saint-Germain, or J\fme Arman with her stricken "If only Marcel
would work!" They waited in the garden by a bed of pansies-
"The only flower I can smell without getting asthma," remarked
Proust, and added as he inhaled one cupped in his hand: "It smells
like skin." The old couple hurried up, overjoyed to see 'Monsieur
Marcel'; he enquired after their wants, insisted on their wanting
something, pressed a handful of crumpled banknotes into the old
woman's hand, and promised, dancing from one foot to the other,
to come again soon and stay longer. On the way back they
stopped at a fair on the outskirts of Paris and devoured, under
naphtha flares in the cold spring dusk, fried chipped potatoes
from paper bags.
On 24 May Proust gave one of the spectacular dinners at 9
Boulevard Maleshcrbes to which he delighted to invite his best
friends, anyone who happened to have done him a good turn
recently, stars of the bourgeois salons, and a sprinkling of persons
from the Faubourg Saint-Germain whose presence would flatter
everyone. The friends were Reynaldo and Gaston; the benefactors
were his seconds, Beraud and Borda; Anatole France and the
Jewish dramatist Porto-Riche were the salonnards; and the
flattering company comprised Montesquiou, Marquis Antoine de